Company or project founders

Muneeb Ali

As CEO and co-founder of Blockstack, a decentralized computing network and app ecosystem that puts users in control of their identity and data, Ali is "enabling apps that can’t be evil," according to his Twitter profile. He has a PhD in distributed systems from Princeton.

Brendan Eich

Eich is best known as the creator of JavaScript. He co-founded Mozilla and served as CTO of Mozilla Corp. In 2016, he launched the Brave browser as Brave Software's CEO, and in 2017 he co-created the Basic Attention Token, a digital advertising token on the Ethereum blockchain.

Charles Hoskinson

Hoskinson co-founded Ethereum. With a degree in mathematics, he's the genius behind Cardano, a decentralized public blockchain and cryptocurrency project. Today, he’s founder and CEO of IOHK, using cryptography to engineer peer-to-peer financial services.

Charlie Lee

Lee has a master's degree in computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. While working at Google, Lee took an interest in bitcoin mining before developing his own cryptocurrency. His first attempt was a cryptocurrency called fairbix, which was plagued with technical bugs and failed, but he bounced back with the creation of litecoin.

Justin Sun

Sun graduated from Jack Ma's Hupan University in China. Born in Singapore, he lives in San Francisco. In 2017, he created the TRON protocol, which claims to be one of the largest blockchain-based operating systems in the world. In June 2019, he won a $4.57 million bid to have lunch with Warren Buffet.

Sajida Zouarhi

Zouarhi is a French blockchain architect for ConsenSys and co-founder of LeBlockFest, a conference and resource about blockchain events. She's among the many looking for Satoshi Nakamoto (the pseudonym of the reputed inventor of bitcoin).

Pioneers in cryptographic technology

Gavin Andresen

Nakamoto named Andresen lead developer of Bitcoin's reference implementation before disappearing from public life. Andresen founded the Bitcoin Foundation and created the first bitcoin faucet, a program that gave away bitcoin to promote its use. He later became lead developer of Bitcoin Core.

Andreas M. Antonopoulos

Antonopoulos became a bitcoin advocate in 2012. An author and coder, he served as chief security officer of Blockchain.info, but now hosts a podcast called Let's Talk Bitcoin. He is a major influence on the cryptocurrency community.

Adam Back

Back is an early cryptographer who invented Hashcash, a proof-of-work protocol cited by Nakamoto in his 2008 bitcoin whitepaper, in 1997. Back has become one of bitcoin's most vocal proponents, and is currently CEO of Blockstream, a software company focused on developing products for the bitcoin network.

Gavin Wood

Wood is a co-founder of Ethereum. He’s also active on the Polkadot project, an open-source project focused on blockchain interoperability. He's the founder and CTO of Parity Technologies, a blockchain infrastructure-development company whose products are based on Ethereum.

More notables

Austin Griffith

Griffith refers to himself as a "hacker, breaker, builder." His GitHub account showcases some interesting projects, including one called Burner Wallet for speedy browser-based cryptocurrency transfers, and another that facilitates token subscriptions on the Ethereum blockchain.

Luke Stokes

Stokes is a top-20 witness, responsible for managing the nodes that validate transactions, on the Steem blockchain. Last year, he sold his stake in a company he co-founded, called Foxycart, to focus entirely on blockchain projects.

Sota Watanabe

Watanabe is a developer and founder of Staked Technologies, which operates block production nodes for decentralized proof-of-stake blockchains for institutional investors. He was formerly associated with Chronicled, which builds blockchain-powered supply chain systems.